Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] Segmentation fault for aligned volk kernel with custom arrays

[Martin Lülf]

> On Fri, Nov 9, 2012 at 11:47 AM, "Martin Lülf" <address@hidden> wrote:
>> Hi list,
>>
>> I am trying to speed up my own gnuradio block using volk. Besides using
>> volk on gnuradios input and output buffers I also want do use it with my
>> own arrays. I found this Thread in the mailing list archive
>> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/discuss-gnuradio/2012-09/msg00055.html
>> which shows how to allocate aligned memory and I also tried using
>> posix_memalign directly as well (see the code below). Both end in the
>> same
>> result: If I run my block with the aligned volk_32fc_x2_multiply_32fc_a
>> kernel my application crashes with a Segmentation fault. I checked with
>> a
>> debugger and it is the volk call at which the segfault happens. I get no
>> segfaults for the unaligned version volk_32fc_x2_multiply_32fc_u. My
>> flowgraph is created with grc and just contains of
>> signal_source->my_block->null_source
>>
>> Running volk_profile, sse3 is selected for both kernels (and the aligned
>> version does not segfault here), so there has to be an issue with my
>> code.
>>
>> I am working on an Intel Xeon X5690 CPU with an 3.2.0-32-generic
>> #51-Ubuntu SMP Wed Sep 26 21:33:09 UTC 2012 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64
>> GNU/Linux
>> and gnuradio-3.6.0
>>
>> I know that there is a newer version of gnuradio available but before
>> turning my whole system upside-down I'd like to know if there is
>> anything
>> wrong with the minimal code example below.
>>
>> Any help is appreciated.
>> Yours
>> Martin
>
> Martin,
>
> The problem is in your constructor. You have not told the block to
> work with your alignment. In blocks that use VOLK, we have this in the
> constructor:
>
>       const int alignment_multiple =
>       volk_get_alignment() / sizeof(gr_complex);
>       set_alignment(std::max(1, alignment_multiple));
>
> We divide the alignment by sizeof(output type) specifically. We should
> be able to hide this in the future, but there's some uncertainty as to
> whether the output type is always the right answer if there are
> multiple types defined, so we do the right thing for each block.
>
> Also, a general note on using fftwf_malloc that I found out the hard
> way. If you have an AVX processor and want to use AVX kernels, FFTW
> needs to be build using --enable-avx. I've had to build FFTW by hand
> on my AVX processors where I want to use VOLK.
>
> Tom
>
>

Hi Tom,

thank you very much for your help. Adding the few lines to my constructor
solved the segfault problem. Now I am trying to understand what I did :)

I assumed with calling set_alignment I tell the scheduler on which bounds
he should try to align, which will result in more aligned arrays being
passed to work. However even without telling the scheduler which alignment
I would like to have is_unaligned() should never return false, when the my
input or output arrays are unaligned and thus in the worst case the
unaligned kernel is called, although the arrays are indeed aligned, but
not the other way around. What am I missing here?

Yours
Martin